Hamburg gets its first nature film cinema and its first nature film award. Filmmakers can now submit documentaries for the European Wildlife Film Awards (EWFA).

The EWFA, presented by the German Wildlife Foundation, will honour outstanding documentaries once a year that deal with nature, wildlife and conservation issues on the European continent. A total of six awards will be presented, including the three main prizes in the categories “Wildlife”, “Biodiversity” and “Nature Conservation”.

Selected films in Europe's only nature film cinema

The films selected by the jury will be shown on the screen in Europe's only nature film cinema, which will open in late summer in the Wild Animal Embassy in Hamburg's HafenCity. “Hamburg is already a nature film capital due to the large number of productions commissioned here. “We are finally making this visible with our modern wildlife and nature film cinema on the Elbe,” says EWFA director Maike Juraschka.

The message of wild animals is a new permanent exhibition in “Roots”, Germany’s highest wooden house in eastern HafenCity. In addition to the interactive exhibition on local wild animals and their habitats and the cinema, the embassy will also house a learning workshop as an attractive extracurricular learning location for students from the metropolitan region.

Wild animals and nature on the screen up close

The exhibition, learning workshop and nature film competition have the same goal: to awaken fascination for the diversity and uniqueness of European nature and to sensitize people to the loss of biodiversity and species extinction in Europe. “Our experience shows that many people do not feel sufficiently informed about topics such as species extinction and habitat loss,” says Ivo Bozic, head of the nature education department at the German Wildlife Foundation. This is also confirmed by a current study by researchers from Munich universities and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT. According to this, almost 80 percent of those surveyed rated their own knowledge of species extinction as “not at all”, “not at all” or “moderately available”. A good 80 percent perceive the topic of biodiversity as “hardly present” in the media. “Given the drama of the issue, this is a frightening result,” says Bozic. “With us, viewers experience wild animals and nature up close on the screen. We hope to inspire them to protect this unique treasure.”

Further information about the European Wildlife Film Awards: https://www.europeanwildlifefilmawards.eu/de

Jenifer Calvi
Press officer
German Wildlife Foundation
Christoph-Probst-Weg 4
20251 Hamburg
Telephone 040/ 9707869-14